Ace weekend at the NPC. Attempted a Dis:Bar:Stream exchange on the Saturday, but Dis' duck was flooded, so became a successful Bar:Stream instead! Unfortunately, we returned to a dead Transit. Made it back to the NPC by shuttling in the cars, ate a fantastic curry, and spent the whole of Sunday faffing with the RAC on our merry way back to London.

Lovely little trip to the Llangattock escarpment, staying at the extremely comfortable Whitewalls cottage (CSS). Full frontal assault on Aggy (Ogof Agen Allwedd) breached both the boulder chokes and got everyone to North Western Junction, where the cooks left sedately, leaving the Turkey dreamers to meander upstream and inspec the formations, before slithering downstream down the impressive passage and then exiting. Excellent evening curry. Sunday saw more modest trips, to Eglwys Faen where a hippy-led Cello & multi instrumental concert was in full swing in the main chamber, and Ogof Pen Eryr which has retained its enjoyable corkscrew climb.

A new year, and a new crop of freshers to introduce to the delights of caving. Excellent weekend altogether: 3 Trips down OFD - Ed's Shortcut / Salubrious, Top Waterfall & Poached-egg climb / round about everywhere climb. A trip to the Neath valley for Sunday, Little Neath by the wetsuit glad, and a fistful of smaller caves (Town Train, Bridge, White Lady) and a bit of wild swimming outside for the others... Good times!

Welcome Team 2011!
Come find our stand in Beit Quad during Freshers Fayre (11AM-4PM, Tuesday 4th October), and have a chat to one of our club members.

We have an excellent Autumn calendar of trips organised, and plans are afoot for foreign trips during the various university holidays.

Since you're here, check out some of our massive website. Thinking big, you may be interested in this Easter's trip to Sardinia (Photos, PDF Report, our exploration project in Slovenia (2011 Updates, 2010 Photos, Dec 2009 Winter Recce Photos). Closer to home, our weekend trip reports may give you a sense of what to expect: typical non-rope freshers trip weekend, SRT Yorkshire Weekend and the kind of harder trip we do later in the year, once all you new guys & girls are trained up.

Jan's put together a great writeup of our recent lightweight trip to Hidden Earth, the yearly national caving conference.

Suddenly it's that time of the year again! Soon we leave our South Ken haunts and haul a minibus of caving gear across Europe to head to a pretty little mountain in Slovenia called Tolminski Migovec.

We've some excellent leads and a keen team this year with a clear plan—we're immediately rerigging Vrtnarija (807m deep / 8776m long) to the bottom and setting up Camp X-Ray (-550m) as a hot-bunking 4-bed camp and pushing the multitude of leads from 500-800m deep. On the surface we will be launching trips down Kavkna Jama (M2) in search of the great, elusive, connection.

During this time we are slaves to the Sistem, so it may seem all a little quiet around here. However, thanks to the wonders of mobile telephony, for the fourth year running, you can follow our every move on twitter @ICCC.

End of August Update: More than 2km of deep cave found! Photos, surveys, tweets and draft report: Izgubljeni Raj 2011.

Cave rescue training ahead of heading out on expedition.

The chief motivator was to get some experience bolt climbing with the new drills and the Raumer stick up, ahead of trying it 'for real' at -800m in Slovenia this summer. Some cheap advanced train tickets to Lancs, three bikes, panniers for the drill batteries and they were away...
Cycling up Kingsdale with cave exploration gear, a suitably retro start to the summer expedition practice...

Excellent three day weekend in Yorkshire ticking off King Pot (7.5hrs), Pennyghent (6hrs) and Meregill (4.5hrs). Fantastic weather, blue skies, sun and enough wind to blow you back down off the hill!

While some of us were jetting off to a Mediterranean isle, the home team completed the excellent JH-Peak through trip...